Deep Dive 2: Why NVIDIA Is Betting on CPG Digital Twins
From factory simulations to shampoo bottles, Omniverse is moving toward the trillion-dollar product visualization market
In Start Here: Product Visualization for 3D Artists, I introduced product visualization as one of the fastest-growing career paths for 3D artists. Then, in Deep Dive 1: The Importance of CAD, we looked at how CAD models form the backbone of most product pipelines.
This week, let’s talk about a company you might not immediately associate with product visualization: NVIDIA.
When I first wrote about NVIDIA Omniverse, it was because I kept hearing all this hype around it but nobody I knew was actually using it. The technology was impressive, but the positioning was off. At the time, Omniverse was primarily showcased as a platform for industrial simulations, including robotics, automotive, and factory layouts. Engineers and technical directors were the target users, not the creative or marketing teams most of us work with. Definitely not for independent artists or companies just starting on their 3D journeys.
What is NVidia's Omniverse?
Nvidia’s Omniverse has been circling around conversations in my network for years. Friends and colleagues have praised its potential—optimizing 3D workflows, automating tedious tasks, and producing high-quality renders.
Now, things are changing in a big way. NVIDIA has started publishing customer stories in Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), with Unilever as the flagship example. Suddenly, Omniverse isn’t just for simulating a robot arm on a BMW assembly line. It’s being pitched as a full-blown content creation platform for 3D product visualization.
Now, whether or not Omniverse is the best toolset for this workflow is debatable, but that’s not what’s important here. It doesn’t matter what was said in this particuluar story. What matters is that NVIDIA felt this was important enough to invest time, enengy, and to connect its brand with this workflow.
NVIDIA doesn’t chase trends. They chase profits.
For one of the most valuable companies on earth to pivot toward CPG workflows means this space isn’t just interesting…it’s big enough to move the needle.
From Factory Floors to Consumer Products
Omniverse’s early reputation was built around high-profile industrial projects. BMW’s “digital factory” is the best-known example: a real-time, interactive replica of their entire production line. Engineers could test new layouts, simulate robots, and identify problems before they happened in the real world.
That was a perfect showcase for Omniverse’s strengths: real-time collaboration, high-fidelity simulation, and GPU-accelerated rendering at industrial scale. But it was also niche. These projects were expensive, complex, and limited to engineering teams in highly technical industries.
Fast forward to today, and those same ideas are being applied to shampoo bottles and deodorant sticks. With Unilever, Omniverse is now being used to create a library of digital twins for every single product SKU across all sizes, shapes, regions, languages, and even seasonal packaging variants. Each digital twin becomes a reusable master asset that can generate visuals for every market without scheduling another photoshoot.
WTF is a Digital Twin?
Welcome back to another installment of WTF of 3D — my ongoing quest to break down some unique (and often misunderstood) concepts in the world of 3D art. I feel like this series is becoming common enough that I may need to create a theme song for it.
Want a new camera angle? Done. Need a quick packaging update for a new market? Just swap the label in 3D and render.
This shift from factories to consumer goods represents a major broadening of Omniverse’s potential audience. It’s moving from specialized industrial teams to global marketing departments.
What Brands Gain from Digital Twins
The Unilever example makes the advantages clear, and they map almost perfectly onto the pain points every marketing team struggles with:
Speed: Campaign imagery that once required months of planning, shooting, and editing can now be produced in weeks or even days. Iterations that used to require overnight offline renders are happening instantly with real-time engines.
Cost: Unilever reported cutting production costs by about half. Fewer physical shoots, fewer reshoots, and fewer one-off assets.
Consistency: Every image, whether for TV, ecommerce, or social, comes from the same “single source of truth” 3D model. The fidelity is so high that when lit and rendered, the results are indistinguishable from real products.
Scalability: For companies with thousands of SKUs, each with dozens of market-specific variants, this is the holy grail. Once the master twin is built, every variant can be generated on demand.
Collaboration: Distributed teams no longer need to ship products or coordinate across time zones to review creative. With Omniverse, stakeholders can jump into the same 3D scene, adjust cameras or lighting live, and sign off instantly.
For brands, this isn’t just about saving money — it’s about transforming how content is created. Digital twins make the content pipeline behave more like software: modular, reusable, and infinitely scalable.
Why Real-Time Rendering Is Interesting in this Workflow
When Omniverse was first demonstrated in factories, the emphasis was on simulation accuracy. Ray-traced and even path-traced renders ensured engineers had precise visual feedback on how machinery and layouts would behave. That was crucial for manufacturing, but too slow for marketing workflows.
CPG is different. Marketing teams don’t need sub-millimeter simulation accuracy. They need speed, interactivity, and creative flexibility. That’s why NVIDIA is leaning into RTX-powered real-time rendering.
In practice, this means:
Stakeholders can tweak lighting, materials, or camera angles in a review session and see the results instantly.
Most day-to-day marketing visuals (ecommerce images, AR product views, social content) can be rendered in real time at near-photoreal quality.
Offline path tracing is still there for the occasional “hero” shot, but it’s reserved for the 10% of content that truly requires it — a billboard or a high-end TV ad, for example.
This hybrid approach makes sense. Real-time rendering now covers 80–90% of marketing needs, while GPU horsepower ensures that when you do need full path tracing, it’s faster than ever.
Unilever’s results underscore this point: their renders weren’t just “good enough.” They were described as “identical to real products,” and they achieved that inside a predominantly real-time workflow. That’s the leap.
The Bigger Strategy at Play
So why is NVIDIA moving this way? Because the CPG and retail industries represent a massive untapped market.
Industrial simulations were a good proof of concept, but the addressable market is limited. By contrast, consumer goods companies generate billions of images every year: packaging shots, ecommerce assets, campaign visuals, AR/VR try-ons, planogram designs, and more. Every product variant in every region creates new demand for visuals.
That’s where digital twins shine. One master asset can serve all of those use cases, reducing both cost and time to market. For companies like Unilever, the return on investment is immediate. For NVIDIA (and all of us), the opportunity is enormous. It’s not just about selling GPUs, it’s about positioning Omniverse as the infrastructure layer for the next generation of product content.
This is exactly how NVIDIA thinks: they don’t just build technology, they identify trillion-dollar markets and make sure their hardware and platforms are essential to them. Factories and robots were never going to generate that level of scale. Consumer products and marketing just might.
What It Means for 3D Artists
For 3D artists, this pivot validates something many of us have been saying for years: product visualization isn’t a side niche. It’s becoming a central pillar of how global companies operate.
The skills you already have — modeling, shading, lighting, rendering — are suddenly in demand in industries that never cared about 3D before. Brands that used to rely entirely on traditional photography or external vendors to create content now need artists who can build, manage, and render digital twins.
And if NVIDIA is serious about this space, that demand is only going to accelerate. Remember: this is a company that could focus on any industry in the world. The fact that they’re betting on CPG is proof that the opportunity is enormous.
Factories were the proving ground. Shampoo bottles are the scale play. And for 3D artists, that shift means new opportunities, new jobs, and an entirely new wave of creative workflows to explore.
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We are super thrilled to have the Co-Founder and Executive Creative Director or Laundry Studio, PJ Richardson, in for an AMA!
PJ Richardson is the co-founder and Executive Creative Director of Laundry Studio, a Los Angeles–based design and animation company known for bold, visually innovative storytelling.
With a background in design, animation, live action, and branding, PJ brings a multidisciplinary approach to his creative leadership. Growing up as a graffiti artist in San Francisco, he developed a unique visual style that blends street-art energy with refined design sensibilities. After earning his B.F.A. in Graphic Design from MICA, he co-founded Laundry in 2006, building it into a nimble, design-driven studio that collaborates with leading global brands.
PJ has directed campaigns for Nike, Beats by Dre, Adobe, Sony, Samsung, Pepsi, Uber, and Balenciaga, among many others. His work has earned accolades including ADC Young Guns and Cannes Lions awards, and he’s a frequent speaker at international creative conferences such as Semi-Permanent, OFFF, Design Matters, Graphika, and FITC.
Passionate about experimentation and collaboration, PJ’s creative philosophy centers on using design to create joy, clarity, and meaningful cultural impact.
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Hello! Michael Tanzillo here. I am the Head of Technical Artists with the Substance 3D team at Adobe. Previously, I was a Senior Artist on animated films at Blue Sky Studios/Disney with credits including three Ice Age movies, two Rios, Peanuts, Ferdinand, Spies in Disguise, and Epic.
In addition to his work as an artist, I am the Co-Author of the book Lighting for Animation: The Visual Art of Storytelling and the Co-Founder of The Academy of Animated Art, an online school that has helped hundreds of artists around the world begin careers in Animation, Visual Effects, and Digital Imaging. I also created The 3D Artist Community on Skool and this newsletter.
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